February's must-see exhibitions: Leigh Bowery, Scottish Colourists and a Surrealist with a taste for the occult

As the art world gears up for Frieze LA—and considers how best to help the city's artists recover from the wildfires—museums and galleries around the world are launching 2025's second wave of shows. These are the exhibitions opening in February that caught our eye.

Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern, London

27 February-31 August

This show will open with Bowery’s arrival in London from Australia in 1980, progressing to his emergence in the city’s 1980s club scene and explosive entry into the dance and art worlds of the decade before his death from an Aids-related illness in 1994. The show will highlight how life became art for Bowery, who demonstrated that performance can take place in contexts outside of the art world, melding into everyday existence. More

Noah Davis, Barbican Art Gallery, London

6 February-11 May

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, Whitechapel Gallery, London

12 February-4 May

Two landmark surveys open in London this month. Donald Rodney, at the Whitechapel Gallery, and Noah Davis, at the Barbican Art Gallery, worked a generation apart but made vital contributions to contemporary art, both through their work and their organising in distinct cultures—Rodney in 1980s and 1990s Britain, Davis in Los Angeles in the 2000s and 2010s. The pair were also, sadly, linked by tragedy. More

American Photography, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

7 February-9 June

Published in 1958, the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans was not universally well received, but it became one of the most influential photographic works of the 20th century. Frank’s story is retold in the catalogue to American Photography, an expansive survey show at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Eight years in the making, the show’s curators were determined to not just follow the canon, but to dig up myriad ways that photography both infiltrated and reflected society. More

Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds, Tate St Ives

1 February-5 May

Tate Britain, London

12 June-19 October

Since her death, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) has been better known as an occultist than an artist. Now, her reputation as a leading figure of British Surrealism is being restored, in an exhibition exploring for the first time the connections between these two facets of her life. Between Worlds, the biggest exhibition of her work ever staged, opens at Tate St Ives this month before later travelling to Tate Britain in London. More

Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh

7 February-28 June

An exhibition at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh will place for the first time the Scottish Colourists—the artists Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, Leslie Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson—in the context of their UK and European contemporaries. Around 110 works will be on display, with about half lent by the Fleming Collection and the others from a wide variety of institutions and some private collectors. More

Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity, Neue Galerie, New York

20 February-26 May

For a handful of years, starting in the mid 1920s, Germany’s doomed Weimar Republic had a period of stability. And that stability is associated with a loose, broad and various movement in the visual and applied arts that quickly became known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This month, the Neue Galerie New York explores this movement through a group show of around 140 works made in the interwar period. More